The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to reading data from and writing data into a storage device, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for accessing compressed data and/or uncompressed data of an image frame in a frame buffer.
A video decoder may decode an encoded bitstream to generate a plurality of image frames to be processed by subsequent procedures. For example, the image frames generated from the video decoder may be processed by a graphic processor or a display processor. In a conventional design, the video decoder writes each image frame into a frame buffer, and the graphic processor/display processor reads each image frame from the frame buffer for further processing. To reduce the memory bus bandwidth requirement of the frame buffer, a data compression scheme may be employed to compress each image frame and generate a compressed image frame to the frame buffer. However, if data of the compressed image frame is continuously stored in the frame buffer, the graphic processor/display processor may have difficulty in randomly accessing data of the compressed image frame in the frame buffer.